Janusz Korczak

Henryk Goldszmit, known by his literary pseudonym Janusz Korczak, was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Warsaw. Qualifying as a pediatrician, Korczak served as a military doctor in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, witnessing the trauma inflicted on vulnerable children. In 1912, he established Dom Sierot (The Orphans' Home) for Jewish children on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, designing it as an egalitarian children's self-governing republic complete with its own children's parliament, children's court of justice, and weekly newspaper (Mały Przegląd).

Korczak's radical educational philosophy, formulated in seminal treatises such as How to Love a Child and The Child's Right to Respect, asserted that children are not people in the making, but complete human beings entitled to full dignity, emotional autonomy, and legal rights. In November 1940, the Nazi occupiers forced Korczak and his orphanage into the squalor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Despite failing health, Korczak spent each day begging for food and medicine across the ghetto to keep his nearly two hundred orphans fed and spiritually comforted.

During the Grossaktion Warschau in August 1942, Nazi SS and Ukrainian guards surrounded the orphanage. Polish underground contacts offered Korczak forged papers and sanctuary outside the ghetto walls. Korczak indignantly refused, stating: 'You do not leave a sick child in the night; you do not leave children at a time like this.' On 5 or 6 August 1942, dressed in his military uniform and holding the two smallest children by the hand, Korczak led his 192 orphans in solemn, dignified formation carrying green banners through the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz, boarding the cattle train to Treblinka where they were murdered together.